REIFICATION AND THE LEFTIST MIND

To reify or to hypostatize is to treat a concept as a thing with the substance of reality.

This includes when people project their subjective opinions onto reality as when some people say, "That girl is pretty." In fact, the girl is average looking - with an average nose and average eyes and so on, and some people merely find that look pretty. If they said, "I find that girl pretty" then they'd be more accurate - and confining their subjective opinion with its proper confines: they are not saying something ontologically true about the girl; they are saying something true about their perception of the girl.

They reify their subjective feeling about the girl into an aspect of the girl herself.

I believe certain people become attracted to leftism and become attached to leftist factions because they are habitual reifiers and leftism is an ideology of reification: leftists in all their varieties - collectivists, groupist, socialists and especially postmodernists - reify their feelings and abstract groups and classes and genres. They feel that their conceptual collections really exist and aren't just an arbitrary heuristic devices. 

And because their policies are based on this "fallacy of misplaced concreteness" they always fail.

As when they pass "campaign finance laws" to prevent groups or classes they don't like - ("Big Oil" for example) - from having influence over the electorate - only to find a few years later that ingenious lawyers in the employ of ambitious people find a way around those laws. Leftists think passing news "campaign finance" laws will solve things and try to pass new laws and new regulations as if human nature won't ingeniously find a way around these new reg's. They did the same thing when prohibiting the sale of alcohol and raising exorbitant taxes on cigarettes (to stop OTHER people from doing what they find distasteful and to attack "Big Tobacco"): they really just gave a reason for ambitious people to start a black market.

It is human nature for humans to do what they want to do when they want to do it. Nobody is taught that; we are born that way. We are born with individual will and individual tastes and individual talents and individual desires. These desires and tastes might be like those that other members of our family have, or those in our tribe or in our race or in our class, or in or nation.

They might not.

That's why despite the fact that grouping humans together in various groups can be fun and can be useful - these genres often make somewhat useful heuristic devices - they are not real.

This is why economic prognostication is so often wrong: individuals are hard to predict and what millions of them might do is truly just as hard to predict.

Leftists are bullies who reify and then project their personal/subjective tastes and goals on to other people. What they feel and believe isn't just right for them; they are, according to leftists/(reifiers) part of the world and right for the world:

• "That girl is pretty."
• "That man has enough money."
• "That house is too big for any person."
• "No athlete is worth that much."
• "Nobody needs to own a gun."
• "A 16 ounce drink it too big."
• "It's not the criminals fault; an unfair.racist society and poverty create criminal and crime and the criminal justice system is racist."
• "Poverty is the swamp in which islamic radicalism grows."

And so on...

Leftists have a hard time distinguishing between islam and muslims; they can't seem to understand that islam - as it is written and practiced - can be evil, but that not all muslims are evil. Leftists seem to think that is you criticize islam that you must be criticizing all muslims. This is similar to how they fell about criticism of Obama: "If you hate Obama's policies  then you must hate blacks."

Leftist love to say stuff like this: "There's no such thing as an illegal alien; just "undocumented workers".

They deny the existence of a real, limited, well-defined/jurisprudentially defined group - real "persons who have broken our immigration laws and regulations" - and instead reify their feelings about these people, by calling them "undocumented workers" - a term which says more about their feelings than reality. 

Trey Gowdy makes this point, brilliantly:

Leftists intuitively know this an that is why they so effectively use feelings to gain adherents.

As Bill Whittle recently said, they feel "morally superior" and attack opponents as morally inferior - as racists or homophobes or islamophobes.

What they have is not "moral superiority"; it is the audacity to reify.